Self-hosted website for posting web novel/fiction

Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨shinnoodles@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

Hey hello, self-hosting noob here. I just want to know if anyone would know a good way to host my writing. Something akin to those webcomic sites, except for writing. Multiple stories with their own “sections” (?) and a chapter selection for each. Maybe a home page or profile page to just briefly detail myself or whatever, I don’t know. It doesn’t have to be fancy, and I apologize for not knowing how to describe this well. I’ve just been searching and searching and I don’t know what to look up to find what I want, it’s extremely frustrating. Any help is greatly appreciated.

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just_another_person@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Just find a static host for free instead of dealing with it yourself. Million out there.

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- anzo@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This is good advice. Learn about markdown syntax, try Obsidian to write notes that can be interrelated in a network, add drawings, and export selected notes to HTML. You can further stylize all of them with some custom CSS. There are many “content management system” (CMS) like Obsidian does. I’d self host ghostwriter. But just search for a CMS on awesome self hosted list and find something popular that’s akin to you for whatever features or underlying tech (e.g. Wagtail for django web devs)
  
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ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don’t have a direct answer to your question. But I advise caution in putting your creative works online in the way you are planning. Between people plagiarizing it (either word for word or just the broader concepts) and AIs doing similar things, you could find that your work gets stolen.

Self-publishing might at least give you a bit of inherent copyright protection. Then at least you will have an ISBN associated to it, and you can always host your stories somewhere (WordPress, Medium, etc.).

If you want to self-publish your stories a few service like Smash Words would work.

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- shinnoodles@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Thank you for the advice. Honestly, I’m a young 20 something that just wants to output creative stuff for people to read and enjoy. None of this really popped in my head, so thanks.
  
  I still want to host my own site for it though, but I will consider the self publishing angle as well. Thanks for the advice.
  
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  - Kid_Thunder@kbin.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Just to be clear you 100% have copyright protection as soon as you put pen to paper.
    
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  - StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Heads up on the copyright thing. Copyright is different nation to nation. @ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world seems to be out of the UK or EU. Not sure what the copyright situation is like there but here in the US, anything you write is already protected under US copyright laws from the moment it’s !published (such as when I hit “post” here), subject to any applicable agreements you’ve entered into, of course.
    
    You don’t HAVE to register your work for it to be under copyright protection, but to doing so would give you a stronger case if you ever decided to go to court over copyright. To register a work in the US you would do so through the Copyright Office.
    
    In general though, @ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world is right though, you should assume anything you put out in the wild will be used in a manner you never intended, and that you may not like.
    
    For examples of how helpful copyright protection is in a practical sense, might want to check out c/piracy.
    
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Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Wordpress or some of its alternatives would probably work well for this. Another alternative would be static site generators, where you pretty much just write the content in Markdown.

It’s also a pretty simple project, it would be a great project to learn basic web development as well.

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StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
For something like this, I think I would use Hugo to generate a static site. You write the post using markdown then tell Hugo to regenerate the site.

If you want to publish and receive comments or feedback via the fediverse, you might take a look at WriteFreely. Simpler to use but more complicated to setup.

Wordpress is also an option, but I personally don’t like it much. I spend all my time playing with all the knobs and never actually publish anything.

github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#…

github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?…

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solrize@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
If you want a fancy multi-user site, the source code for archiveofourown.org is on github or gitlab (idr which). But for a small single user site I’d just go static. You could go full nerdy and write in texinfo then run an html converter. Texinfo is actually for computer manuals so it has chapters, sections, cross references, indexes, link navigation between pages, the whole bit. It is a markup language which I think is better than a wysiwyg formatter for documents that will be read in more than one way. I think there is a way to make epubs from texinfo docs.

In a sort of similar spirit there is Org mode (org-mode.org) but you have to be or become an Emacs zealot to use it.

Look also at pandoc.org which converts between lots of formats.

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ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
motherfuckingwebsite.com If it’s just text, you can probably make a static HTML website and accomplish your goals. I’m not sure what format it’s in now but Markdown is what I use and then just export to HTML.

If you just want to host epub (or equivalent files), you can still make a static page and link to them with Cloudflare Pages, GitHub.io, or one of many free static page hosting sites.

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clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It sounds like you want a blog that lets you categorize or tag your entries to keep them together.

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witten@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I haven’t used an out-of-the-box self-hosted solution for this, but I agree with others that blog or static site generator software could work for this. I think the main challenges you’ll find though are: 1. Formatting the content/site for long-form readability, and 2. Table of contents and previous/next chapter links.

Fortunately blog and static site software have plugins that can add missing functionality like this. Here’s one for WordPress (that I have no first-hand experience with): wordpress.org/plugins/book-press/

I also want to ask: What’s your plan for discovery/marketing? Because one of the benefits of the non-self-hosted web novel sites is that readers can theoretically discover your story there. But if you instead just post it on your own site, how will readers ever find it?

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I2jgwh0hYtxrCZQ@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The other day I saw someone hosting their blog on a GitHub repository.

Just using markdown files and folders to organise it to their liking.

If you are writing stories you could use a similar approach. A folder per story then subfolders for chapters. Then having the main page have links each story’s folder with links to each chapter inside.

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- mbirth@lemmy.mbirth.uk ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Sounds like GitHub Pages.
  
  Apart from that, I like GRAV for small website projects. It works completely without a database (or in other words: it uses the filesystem as the database that it basically is) and backups/restores are simple copying everything to the right place.
  
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it_a_me@literature.cafe ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There is also writefreely. It is fairly basic, but says it supports “publish[ing] to multiple blogs from one account”. Haven’t really used it, but it looks kinda cool imo

github.com/writefreely/writefreely

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- poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It works nicely, but for some weird reason spammers really like it, so never open registrations on it.
  
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____@infosec.pub ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Not aware of a FOSS 1:1, but that sounds like Ghost or your blogging platform of choice.

Except WP, if self hosting, IMHO. Wordpress == PHP == trouble and risk. I don’t mean to malign WP specifically, but if you’re a noob, you want to avoid exposing PHP to the public internet - especially if there’s any possibility you’ll eventually forget about maintaining and upgrading.

Just too damn easy for some threat actor to come along and exploit a vuln you missed, in the software or the web server or WP.

That said, years of WP taught me that, roughly, you want “pages” linking to “posts” ( == chapters). In theory, the former is a permanent reference and the latter is dynamic to some degree.

In reality, the existence of search engines before enshittification means the two have been conflated frequently.

Pages would often get links in a sidebar or menu. Posts might get buried much farther down, but can also be linked to. They’re often, but not always, time—specific.

“2023 NY [financial product] Guide” (page) might well link to a years-old post about subrogation regarding an attempted BBQ of a random wild animal that went wrong and caused a fire, because it’s a positively classic example of the same that makes a great deal of sense to most people, even if they don’t understand terms like subrogation.

Post/page are distinctions that WP makes, but are abstractly relevant to setting up abs any CMS (which is what you want, Content Management System) so that you (ideally) never have to figure out how or where to link something, its just native. Changing the structure means changing the URLs which is annoying at best, and fraught with peril at worst.

Above 2023 xxxx Guide page, would be example.org/NY-Xxxx-Guide and that way you DGAF about the sidebar links, for instance. Link it once, and then you only have to update 50 posts with the year and/or some change in the data, which can be done programmatically in the db as a trivial exercise. “UPDATE page SET title = (SELECT title FROM… WHERE ‘2022’ in title TO ‘2023’;”

Disclaimer: do not run that query as copypasta, it’s meant to illustrate a point and not to exhibit valid SQL on any db (Not least because I intentionally left out at least one closing paren and simplified a bit. I’m a PG guy, and I am 100% certain it would fail as written, but fully expect anything approaching the standard to reject it. But you get the idea, update 50 states at once with a fairly simple query, once a year.

Lots going on here, but go for a modern CMS and repeatable updates, not a legacy product with a bunch of tech debt accumulated. Build it clean, plan it out first, and know whatever DB is backing it fairly well.

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NeedForSeed@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
If I understand correctly, you want a self hosted version of Wattpad or Inkitt for posting stories. I don’t know if there is a 1:1 software that can do exactly that.

As a starting point, you could try building a static website. They easiest ones follow a blog format and store the text on a markdown file. Many have recommended Hugo on this thread, but I’d like to recommend Zola instead. Paired with the well documented tabi theme, you could spawn a new “blog” for each story and use the archive view to have the chapter selection.

It’s not exactly the best solution, but I think it’s a good starting point to try it out.

P.S. Zola is inspired in Hugo. The creator thought Hugo was too complicated.

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EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
ghost.org would probably work pretty well for you.

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- maryjayjay@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  What part of that is self hosted?
  
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  - EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The part where you self host it? I don’t understand the question.
    
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  - russjr08@bitforged.space ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    They have their own hosting plans, but you can also self host it.
    
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Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Others have suggested Markdown formats, if you’re willing to do that you might want to look at Silverbullet.

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lemmyvore@feddit.nl ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
A static site generator (Hugo would be great for your needs) and host the files on a CDN like bunny.net. It costs $1/month for 100 GB transfer included and you pay 1 cent/GB above that. But I sincerely doubt a small personal website that’s mostly text will serve more than 100 GB/month.

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Kid_Thunder@kbin.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I see some comments recommending wordpress but wordpress is a security problem, especially if you're using 3rd party plugins. It is such a bad problem that their are 'wordpress security' applications but even then wordpress sites get hacked all the time. If you are going to use it, it is best to let some other host handle it for you if you don't know a whole lot about what you're doing.

There are many, many other content management systems out there. Some are lighter than wordpress and some heavier. They are all about posting and managing content. Most of them have some sort of user and authoring system. Once you're webserver is set up, many are written in a mixture of php and python so setting them up is generally drag and drop with either minor configuration file edits or wizards. Many of them have sections that you can set up using a labeling/tagging system. Most of them allow you to have the 'stories' as private or draft where you have to actually click publish before people can view them. Some have user roles systems where you can limit viewing and even editing between different roles for sections.

Generally, once their setup is done, they are point and click to do everything.

Here's a nice list of FOSS CMS' (which includes Wordpress of course).

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blargerer@kbin.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You can probably throw together a pretty simple wordpress website without much knowledge. Just keep it mostly out of the box, maybe change the theme.

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shinnoodles@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I cannot reply to everyone, but genuinely thank you all so much for the help. I’ll be going with a simplistic zola setup suggested by one of the commentors. I barely expected a handful, let alone all these comments. It really means a lot, especially to a noob who felt like this was a really dumb question.

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nicgentile@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Grav.

I am currently using this to do exactly what you are doing. I moved from Ghost cause of many reasons. Can share links in PM if you want.

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- essteeyou@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This Grav?
  
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mbirth@lemmy.mbirth.uk ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Apart from all the online tools there are also offline website builders like blocs (macOS/iPad - but there are similar tools for Windows as well) that let you design your website and will spit out the files you then just need to upload to any provider of your liking. It’s basically a WYSIWYG static site generator.

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UNY0N@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
obsidian.md/publish

Obsidian is awesome, and obsidian publish costs money but it’s very easy to use.

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- Opisek@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There are obsidian plugins that export into static pages.
  
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  - UNY0N@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Also a great idea, I didn’t know that.
    
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ID411@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Write.as

Or any of these alternativeto.net/software/medium/?license=openso…

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